It’s been four weeks, today. Same as the last three of those weeks, I’m up at 4 on my day off in Michigan winter. Candlelight, cat, and decaf espresso.
I woke up saying I love you I love you I love you I love you. That has been going on for a couple years, an uncool and unchosen mantra that rises up from the unconscious to try to trick my mouth into speaking it, whenever I’m in a liminal state. On the thresholds: dreaming/waking, hungry/sated, living/dying. I love you I love you I love you.
Tamping down the lunatic I love you loop, the first thought as I sit this morning is of the six tastes, and especially the periods of global community bitterness I’ve lived through in this practice: in 2006, ‘09 and ‘17. How strongly those bitter times contrast with the sweetness of this time. I wouldn’t fully taste the now without them. For me personally, right now, and this past month; this is the sweetest ashtanga has ever been. In almost 25 years, nothing has come close to this frankly precious quality of time.
Like this espresso, bitterness has powerful motility. It is composed, Ayurveda teaches, of the elements air and space. Bitterness is the expression of pure vata. Entropic. A touch of bitterness in the upper regions of the gastro-intestinal tract gets the waste products moving. It is bitterness which transports fully digested experiences out of the system. That was the case in 2017; most of us still remember what we went through then. The pursed lips and subsequent hit to the solar plexus as we learned our own community/family secrets. It’s not a problem. Bitterness has its own goodness and function. Being with it, for years, makes the sweetness of now so complex.
Sweetness, according to Ayurveda, expresses the elements of earth and water. Of the six tastes, it is the closest to the ground. Unlike bitterness, which is made of air and moves so easily through space, sweetness is something you can touch, and hold. It slows you down. Kapha dosha.
This is a tangible time, sometimes too real. The sadness, devotion, connection, messiness. The recognition of the person and the scene we had, and how much we actually loved them. The raw irrepressible kindness that comes out of people in a crisis. The terraforming of community from an archipelago into a single continent – a Pangaea of grief. Where everyone can walk (and do asanas) upon the fault lines. It is sweet taste that draws us together, draws the tongue to the roof of the mouth, draws the eyelids softly together. Sweetness is a concentric movement of earth and water.
For me personally and some others who were there when it happened, there’s been a resistance to stepping out of the eternal snow globe (leaf globe) of that day. Back into cyclical life. I’m not sure I understand this suspicion in me, the unwillingness to move forward from the worst possible thing that has happened. It’s complex, and has to do with love. With having a teacher. With relationship. But at the root it seems to be that there is real insight in this time – truth, goodness, and beauty, that love and death forced to the surface at the moment of the crash.
I’ve spent all of life low key dreading the moment I have to be present for death – my own but especially that of anyone I love. It’s been this terror in my cells, a repressed animal knowledge. The thing is, facing this worst possible experience – the experience that ends experience – seems to have turned that animal terror into something else. I don’t know what yet. Some kind of grace.
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